


MECHS SIDE - Faustian Bargain

by CloudDreamer



Series: The Mechanized Archives [2]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Dr Carmilla Has ADHD, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Full names, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Local Lesbian Comes To Terms With Gender Identity; Death Toll In The Millions, Projection Hours, Statement Fic, abuser perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23514595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Statement of Doctor Carmilla regarding... a long series of mistakes.No longer canonical to The Mechanized Archives and somewhat out of date with my understanding of Doctor Carmilla as a character.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville, Dr Carmilla & Nastya Rasputina, Dr Carmilla & The Mechanisms
Series: The Mechanized Archives [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691956
Comments: 12
Kudos: 45





	MECHS SIDE - Faustian Bargain

**Author's Note:**

> TW for the perspective of a repentant abuser who believes she'll relapse. No actual abuse is shown.
> 
> No plot spoilers, just hints at lore and style.

Statement of Doctor Carmilla, regarding… a long series of mistakes.

So, what I’m about to say sounds pretty bad. In my defense, I was about six billion years old before I started. Every single person I had ever met died in what was, relatively speaking, less than the blink of a human eye, and that includes the oldest avatars on this planet. Perhaps some across the galaxy, I might compare to a bug. They can be remarkably resilient, until they’re not. 

Even the All-Seeing Eye cannot possibly begin to comprehend the scale I exist on. I have stared into the Unending Void and met its gaze as an equal. It is not your merely life that is transient. I was born eons before your planet collected itself from dust, and everything you hold dear will fall back into it. I have known every fear you hold in these walls with an intimacy that you will pretend does not make you salivate with jealousy, Archivist. I have mastered almost every field known to this iteration of humanity and far more that your nightmares and fantasies will not begin to touch upon. I have killed more people than have ever and likely will ever exist on this entire planet, twice over. This is a context you will not understand. This is a context nobody else will ever understand, and I have, more or less, resigned myself to that fate. It is one I never consented to. 

There are others who understand, but what unifies them is their hatred for me, I hatred I now see to be justified. Their ninth is far closer to me than anyone is comfortable with, and I fear she will repeat my mistakes. I will not step in. If she is to learn, it will be through the same method I did. That is, if I have learned. There is a desperation in me that I am cursed to carry with me across all of time, to the heat death of the universe and perhaps further. I have always fallen to the Bond Starved, just as I have pulled others into the Gaslit Strings. 

I first met Jonathan D’Vangelis on New Texas, a couple hundred million light years away, while this planet was in the Cambrian era, so I don’t think you’ll be able to do much follow up on that particular element. If you try to ask him about it, you’ll earn yourself a loud song and a bullet in between your eyes, if you don’t immediately drop the subject or if you point out that song might’ve been fudging a couple of details. He might shoot you anyway. 

Of course, the kid I met would’ve been aghast to hear that. He was short, scrawny, and had a bit of temper, but he had a good heart. He poured all of his passion into each new project, even when nobody was looking, which tended to be most of the time. His mother was a tailor and his father had a gambling problem, trading away every bit of money she earned for another shot at winning big. None of them were ever at home for long and when they were, they'd bicker. 

Jonathan could talk big about how much he hated both of them, but he couldn’t stay mad forever. He loved the stories they’d read to him on those rare nights, and he pretended he didn’t hear them when they argued about money. He started doing odd jobs and took up the slack on the chores starting young because he knew from those late night fights that his mother was exhausted when she got home. 

As he got older, the resentment got stronger, but he kept up with the chores, despite the fact he lacked any talent. He tried cooking once, and I nearly choked. He said his mother made the same face, except there hadn’t been arsenic in her dish. I’d told him he could stick to trying to cook for me, no poison required, if he really wanted me dead, and he threw a plate at me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. He wasn’t the best in school and got into a couple of fights, but when he got a blow in, it was an accident more often than not. 

That’s actually how I met him. He was in a bit of a scrum with one of his school’s bullies, because she’d said something to him about his father. I never figured out what it was. It’d been three days, and I wasn’t entirely fluent with the language yet. I was just passing through, trying to work out the details of my next gig. New Texas is a dusty planet, and I’d gotten so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t realize I was following the smell of blood till I saw the kid lying in the dirt beneath me. I call him kid; he was nineteen. The bully was a year younger, but she was taller. 

I usually would’ve fed on him. He was pretty badly beaten, and nobody would miss a kid like him. The bully might’ve even thought she’d killed him, if he never showed up. On a desert planet like New Texas, I wouldn’t even need to spend the time burying him. Just toss him outside of the city limits and let the planet do my job for me. Let me tell you, burying bodies gets to be boring as all hell after an eternity of it. 

I’ve thought about that day so much since then, but I honestly couldn’t give you an answer as to why I didn’t. Maybe I knew he was a fighter. Maybe it was because I was in a funk, the special immortal funk that sinks into your bones and leaves you hyperaware of how little anyone else, ever, could remotely begin to understand you. It’s not an exercise in self-pity like it is for most mortals; it is a slideshow of all the times you’ve tried to make people get it with all that little variations that failed on loop. If I told you all of those stories, beginning to end, and neither of us fed, slept, or breathed, it’d take approximately twenty three years. 

I didn’t tell him any of that. I told him I could teach him how to fight. Not a first for me, though certainly a rare occurrence. I think he might’ve reminded me of someone I used to know, though I’m not sure who. Maybe I’m  
mixing up my timelines again and the kid in my memory reminds me of his older self. I’m far from perfect at keeping track of this. Anyway, he said yes without thinking about it and demanded we start then while he was battered and bruised. I forced him to let me patch him up first, otherwise I might’ve bitten him before we got through the first lesson. He thought it was a joke, but my funk had gotten me in rare form. Besides, it was bright out and my hat was doing fuck all to protect me from the sun. 

I went after the bully later. Maybe cuz I was fond of Jonathan already; maybe out of convenience. Who can say. Not you. He didn’t ask questions. People thought it was him who’d offed her, finally, and he didn’t contradict those rumors. If anything, he confirmed them by lasting slightly longer in the next fight, once the other kids got over their intimidation. He didn’t want to fight, but if he was going to have to, he was going to do it well. He was going to be the best. 

I laughed at that a bit, mostly to myself. He couldn’t be the best, cuz I already was by a fair half a dozen billion years. I knew he didn’t believe me about the immortality thing, and he wasn’t going to stand for me injuring myself to prove it. He was nice like that.

He’d tell me his stories. He wasn’t just repeating his parents’ tales. He was coming up with new ones. He had a fair singing voice too, and I played him my ukulele. New Texas didn’t have stringed instruments, so he thought it was magical. I taught him a couple of my songs, mentioned I had a gig coming up, and he was so excited to see me play. We never got to that point. 

He cried a whole lot about when Jack told he had to kill his father. I offered to help, but he said it was important he do it himself. He wanted to be stronger, more like me, and I was too ashamed to let him know how bad at an idea that was. I found him crying afterwards, sobbing like a little baby over a corpse, and I said we should get revenge on his father’s buddy, so we did that. Well, I did that. He mostly watched. Kinda impressive, now that I think about it. He barely blinked. 

He had a heart attack shortly after. Some sort of congenital issue. The adrenaline was too much for him. In his last dying breaths, he asked me to save him, but he was already gone. I was so angry at the world. Even by my standards, I’d barely gotten to know him and now he was gone? I knew mortals didn’t live that long, and they were so fragile. I’d been a fool getting attached once again, but as I berated myself, I felt my conviction strengthening. I wasn’t going to take it. I couldn’t. I was tired of the Final Stop taking everything I cared about from me. So, I didn’t. 

I’ll skip over the exact process. I’m not entirely stupid. There’s a reason I resisted the urge to share immortality with those around me as I watched them die, again and again, for as long as I did, and I’m not going to pass the methods onto the exact sort of people who’d do it to see if they could.

I’m not going to lie about it anymore, not to myself and not to anyone else. There wasn’t anything pure in my motives. I was lonely, I was arrogant, and I was tired. Literally tired. I never get enough goddamn sleep. It’s true I don’t need it in the same insistent way mortals do, but it’s still important. For starters, it helps me think my decisions through and not immediately double down on what I consider to be the worst decision in my entire life, at least, until we get to the others. 

I did it wrong. I know what I did now. I knew it so soon after. I promised him I wouldn’t do it again, and he said good with such vile, I knew he despised me. I asked him if he’d rather be dead, then why had he asked me to save him? It sounded smart to me then. I deserved that slap, delivered with all the technique I’d taught him, and I deserved to feel it. Of course I didn’t. I laughed, partially out of shock that he’d turn what I taught him on me and partially because I didn’t think he was serious. Partially because I was repressing any and all doubts so deep they wouldn’t resurface for two millennia. 

Aurora, my ship then, she liked him. She took his side more often than mine, anyway, and took to locking doors on me or guiding Jonathan away. She’s not as big as this moon. I’m surprised nobody’s weaponized her yet. Might have something to do with the influence the Nightmares have over this world. We’re all a lot more decentralized out there. Not that I am a servant of one, not precisely. I am my own being, and my creations are theirs. 

I’m still proud of them. Especially Jonathan. He’s harder now, quicker to anger and quicker to escalate any conflict to blows. He didn’t start killing immediately, no, it took him about sixteen years before he did it again, out of his own free will. But when he did... I could see the look on his face. Bloodlust, as plain as it was on mine when I first emerged from the embrace of the dirt they’d buried me in.

He was so sensitive to pain in those days. By the end of us, you could shoot him, and he’d stop for as long as it took to pull the bullet out. He started jumping out of Aurora instead of waiting to land with Ashes around seventeen thousand years in. It wasn’t far from the first time he’d done it, but Ashes can talk when falling at terminal velocity. I do that sometimes, and it’s not the same without someone roasting you the entire time. If I so much as scolded him, Jonathan would glare at me and maybe attack me. Like, it’s my fault we’re in this mess so he gets to criticize me for every small choice I made along the way. Criticize me with a lethal weapon. 

To be fair, it wasn’t like his attempts were doing anything other than annoying me. He probably didn’t deserve my retribution, especially since it hastened his desensitization to pain. He was scared and alone and he’d burned all his bridges home. I was his only family then. I should’ve realized bringing Anastasia back was only going to make things worse, since then he’d have someone else to protect from me, the monster in his eyes, but I thought I’d be able to use them as leverage for each other. 

Besides, I liked Cyberia. It was cold and merciless, the people there equally so, and finding Anastasia, with her strange mixture of compassion and royal detachment, left me curious, and Aurora was fond of her for some reason I still don’t fully comprehend. Emotions are a mystery I’ve studied for eons, but I’ve resigned myself to never knowing the full story. My position is just too detached.

Aurora was stolen at some point, but Jonathan stole her back in a rather unfair game of Cyberian Roulette. When he did, the three of us fired the first shot of the revolution. Ethics in the specific failed me ages back, but I’ve still got a fondness for revolutions. If there’s one going down, I’ll usually end up on the side of the people. Not that it tends to matter too much. With this sort of thing, the size and cohesion of your group tends to matter more than individuals in it, no matter how good those individuals are. If I’m not a commander, my influence tends to be limited to my battlefield. 

When the dying Anastasia found her way to the Aurora, I saw it as a sign. I’d already broken my promise to myself, why not my one to Jonathan? Why not that first one again, even more blatantly, in a way I couldn’t justify as a temporary lapse in perspective. She already knew how to play violin, and Aurora liked her. She could be so beautiful with my work running through her veins. I didn’t break her as badly as I did Jonathan. I was more careful, even as I went further. I’d held myself back so long. I set up mental barriers to keep her from attacking me, intentionally shackling her to avoid inconvenience without thinking of all the other people she might hurt, and those chains were made of love. 

It was the two of them, Aurora, and I for a long time. They both might’ve hated me and feared me, but they couldn’t leave me. I was the only one who understood, after all. The only one who would ever and could ever understand what it meant to live unendingly. I told them and sung them my all stories, and they believed me because I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t exaggerating. As much as they accused me of manipulation, I was always unflinchingly honest. 

Ashes O’Reilly was next. The gap between the first two and them wasn’t anywhere near as long as between Jonathan and I, but it was far longer than between Jonathan and Anastasia, who were going by Jonny D’Ville and Nastya respectively. We set a planet alight, and those two stood behind me as I stood behind them, proud of everything they’d accomplished for no reason other than that I’d claimed them. 

This was about when Aurora and Anastasia started dating. Yes, my spaceship who used to be a moon. I’m going to leave the implications of that one up to you. 

It’d felt good to watch that planet burn, and before I knew it, we’d ran into a man floating in the void with the funniest story. Drumbot Brian. He was already a bit of a cyborg, but his technology wasn’t strong enough to save him from the vacuum of space. I imagine it as I write my statement for you, and I hum myself a tune they’ve since stolen back. The others, they’ve rejected the ones I wrote for them, replacing them with triumphant tales of revenge or doing their best to wipe all records of them from the world, but he didn’t. I can’t say I understand him very well. It was less than a decade after Ashes when we met him. 

There was nothing flashy I could do with such a thoughtful man, nobody to ruin as a test run, except for him. I controlled him completely, dividing his mind into two distinct settings of morality. Most people don’t actually disagree with the sentiment that the ends justify the means, but they hate the phrase because of how cold it is. It implies someone sitting in a room somewhere deciding which ends justified how many means that broke through boundaries of accepted behavior. 

The real problem isn’t that it’s cold. The real problem is that nobody really knows what their means entail or what their ends imply. It doesn’t matter. By any standard, I destroyed him for no reason other than my own curiosity and satisfaction. Was it worth it? If you asked me then, I would’ve said yes. Then again, I wasn’t even asking the question then. 

I knew they were mad at me. I knew they thought they hated me, despite the wires of devotion I’d spun through the younger ones’ minds that strengthened and restricted their resistance every time they saw me. Every time they sensed me. I pushed further with Ivy, whose brain I’d replaced, leaving myself with controls more subtle and delicate and ways to access her memory from a distance. I don’t know how much she understands about what I did to her, and I can’t say if she lost her memories of her life before because of an accident or because I wanted her to love me and only me. We were the only ones. It was in their best interests. I swore to myself: I didn’t keep breaking promises because I was selfish and lonely and addicted to the high of control, utterly and completely. I did it because it was necessary. 

It wasn’t necessary. There was nothing good about it. 

Tim was the last one I remember or understand. Marius and Raphaella joined more recently, and I don’t know their stories. When I think of them, I think I start to understand your kind. I feel the instinct to dig my needles into your skulls and tease out answers, reassuring them with one hand and making them hurt with the other. I would rip it out of their minds directly if I had the chance, make them mine, and that is why I can’t see them. As much as I want to. 

Tim was the last one because once I’d turned him, someone Jonathan had known while he was alive, something changed. Someone changed. 

It was then I’d realized my mistake. Well. Mistakes, plural. Think back to every embarrassing moment you’ve ever had, every person you’ve hurt. Was it a joke gone on too long, past the point where it was funny? Were you the bully in a courtyard showdown? Did you take a too-good-to-be-true job offer at face value and not look any further because you were scared you would lose it? Think about every single memory you hold to be a sign of your failings as a human being, no matter how valid or unfair those moments might be, and multiply it by seven billion years. One for approximately every human on this planet. 

You cannot imagine what it feels to hate yourself when you’re an immortal. Most of the people I have harmed are long dead. Planets I razed would now have been consumed by their suns. It’s easy to overlook consequences for so long, to grow numb to being called crazy, cruel, monstrous… manipulative. All of this must sound like an attempt at justifying myself to a jury that’s already decided to hang me. It’s not like you have any grounds to judge. The only way you’re any better than me is scale. 

I flew through the stars for so long. I built in defenses against isolation based insanity for my Mechanisms so they’d wouldn’t shatter and gave them universal translators so they didn’t need to rework all their songs every time they traveled. I carved their silver organs with a subtly that masters of the trade would die for. I thought nothing of writing my name in a language even Ivy can’t understand, again and again. I branded them, and I will always know where they are. 

Their existence is an itch beneath my skin. I made them desperate for my love because I was desperate for theirs. It didn’t seem fair they got to hate me, when I hated myself already. I drifted, letting the ice crawl up and down my skin and through my flesh just as I burned from the heat of the sun. Every part of me ached, and I sobbed, my words stolen without an atmosphere to carry them. There are so many ways to hurt if you can’t die, but the worst hurt is the pure, bone-deep, understanding that you have irreparably damaged another.

I watched the wreckage of a moon float around me as my one working eye rebuilt itself again and again. And I did not die. My tears froze like diamonds on my cheeks, and I watched the bodies of soldiers from both sides of the meaningless war float by. I know the story. I was there to bring Tim back, after all, and I knew it was my fault, or near enough that it wouldn’t matter. It was funny, from a distance, but I saw the world bellow consumed in waves, and I thought of all the people I’d lost, their lives cut short by violence, equal parts mine and other, or the inevitability of time. 

I am a bad person. I don’t want forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. I’ve inflicted my Mechanisms on the universe, and I made them worse than when they began. I’ve brine and put myself back together again and again. I’ve left worlds better and I’ve returned just to blow its the fuck up to make myself feel worse. My actions have consequences on levels that you don’t understand. They’re not better than me. They get to smile and laugh and dance with each other, but I just have myself unless I lie and manipulate and trap. They get to have friends because I made them for each other. Without me, they would’ve died eons apart, never having met and never having fulfilled a millimeter of their potential. They never would’ve loved. They’re unified by hating me, and I deserve every bit of that hate, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. 

They’re still not better than me. They’re monsters, every one of them but a different breed of monster. They’re the ones you sympathize with because they’re fun. They leave devastation in their wake, children separated from parents in the wake of a wave of flame and lovers torn apart. All for the sake of a good story, they’ll say, and that’s only true when you have the right of distance. You sit reading through these statements, reading mine, and you live the terror of the moment, but you’ll never understand the consequences. 

Monsters like you don’t see the everyday people who wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the soldier with the skin of wood they’d trusted and let into their home, only to find it standing over them, shoving their children’s teeth into their jaw. You’re there for the moment of the pain. You get an overview of the consequences, a mention of a nightmare, but you don’t see their everyday life. You don’t watch them fail to move on. You don't watch the frantic arguments with the police, the conversations with doctors, how they try so hard to pay for something to fix it, but it can't be fixed. 

My Mechanisms, they’re easy to understand. They’re easy to love. They burn with the heat of the suns we destroyed together. They lie with every smile, but at least they stick to a story. I don’t remember most of what’s true about me anymore. They are the only entities that come close to understanding me, but I am still orders of magnitude older than them. And I am a fresh monster for each of those years.

Immortality turns you hard. You can’t love like this, unless you’re ready to have your heart broken over and over again. But that’s hard, not impenetrable, and I’m not some kind of god. People wield my name as a curse. I am the Devil in thousands of different mythos, bringing change for better or for worse, but usually for worse, and I thought I could create something good? I’m an idiot who couldn’t tell they weren’t mad at me, they were terrified of me, and they were lashing out because they didn’t know how to cope with it. Who was going to tell me? Who would I have listened to? 

They were good kids, all of them, before I ruined them. Every good part of you stays dead when you come back. It’s not something I can fix with a bit more tinkering, a bit more programming, a bit more control. It is an irreconcilable change in perspective. Each time I force myself to sleep, I see their faces in my head. Not the more than trillions I’ve burned, but those nine, cursed with immortality and forever shackled to me. 

I don’t trust myself to undo it, and I suspect they’d rather live with it than see me again, because the moment I show up in their lives, everything they’ve buried comes right back to the surface. They’re not exactly as self-indulgent as I am when it comes to guilt. I’ve combed through every flicker of memory, torturing myself with should’ve and could’ve been. If I’d explained what it entailed, if I’d stayed far away from everyone… 

I’ve read Anastasia’s statement more times than I can count, and the words I once held sacred have lost all meaning to me, nothing more than collections of syllables. I can't go near them. I shouldn't. I will not. I’ve gotten myself locked in multiple max security prisons over the years and buried myself in concrete just because I heard they were coming to the same solar system. If I’m lucky, they’ll have left by the time I inevitably break out, and I don’t need to face the part of me that’s so starved for permanence that I take everything they’ve built and twist it into my own design. I’ll find new ways to hurt them, ways that break past pain resistance built by a millennia’s worth of needless suffering. 

As I write my story for you, that need rises in me, the looming specter I face every damned day. I know one day I will be too weak to resist, and I will either return to them or bring some fresh hell into this world, dragging some. My love is a poison, and I flooded them with it. I’ll say it was a mistake, that I didn’t realize how badly I’d hurt them, and that’s true to an extent. It all hit me as I floated through the cosmos, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t chose to make it worse at almost every turn. I wanted them to love me, because I wanted to make their failures hurt. I’d suffered, and if they were to understand me as I needed— wanted— then they would too. 

I never asked for this, and I will never have what I desire most. 

Why should anyone else get to?

Statement ends.


End file.
